My first revenue share agreement was signed in 1996 with Viterbo College (now Viterbo University) in Wisconsin. But revenue share partnerships had existed in higher education long before online learning and the Online Program Manager (OPM) era.
In the late 1980s, R. Wayne Clugston approached William (“Bill”) Crothers, then current President of Roberts Wesleyan College, with an innovative idea: licensing his degree-completion program, designed specifically for working adults, to other colleges and universities. At the time, this was a remarkably forward-thinking concept.
The program was built around andragogical principles of adult learning and featured an accelerated format in which students met one evening per week for four hours, progressing through their coursework as a cohort. Today this may seem commonplace, but in the late 1980s it represented a significant departure from traditional higher education.
By the time I joined Wayne at College Leadership Consultants in 1996, the Organizational Management curriculum had already been licensed through revenue share agreements to approximately 30 colleges and universities.
The model was straightforward but comprehensive.
We provided a complete curriculum package that, in the earliest years, was literally reproduced one Xerox copy at a time. Every course included a detailed faculty manual with minute-by-minute guidance for delivering instruction across a 10- to 12-course sequence. Institutions also received a Credit for Prior Learning (CPL) assessment framework, marketing and recruitment guidance, financial aid procedures, and recommendations for modifying their student information systems to accommodate nontraditional academic calendars and financial aid disbursement.
Students typically entered the program with an associate degree, or the equivalent amount of transfer credit, completed approximately 30 semester credits in the cohort program, earned another 15 credits through CPL, and finished with a capstone research project. In roughly 18 months, they had earned a bachelor’s degree.
This was years before internet-based distance education became mainstream. While correspondence courses existed, the technology and infrastructure necessary for large scale online learning had not yet emerged. Institutions seeking to expand access typically established satellite instructional centers in nearby communities, bringing programs closer to working adults rather than expecting working adults to come to the main campus.
Our revenue share model reflected the value of that partnership. We received approximately 30% of tuition revenue, with the agreement capped at a fixed dollar amount—around $225,000 in those early years.
I still vividly remember arriving at Viterbo College with what was then cutting-edge technology: a stack of 3.5-inch floppy disks loaded with the curriculum. If memory serves, there were nearly 40 disks because of the storage limitations of the time.
The first challenge was simply finding a computer on campus that could read them. Much of the campus was still using 5.25-inch floppy drives. Eventually we located a compatible machine, loaded the files one disk at a time, printed every document, and assembled them into three-ring binders—master copies for faculty and student manuals for every learner.
Some things have certainly changed.
I also remember my first faculty development session on campus. I introduced the principles of adult learning, beginning with the work of Malcolm Knowles and other pioneers in the field. Initially, many faculty members were skeptical. Teaching experienced adults required a different philosophy than teaching traditional undergraduate students, and not everyone was convinced.
By the end of the workshop, however, the conversation had changed. Several faculty members embraced the model and became champions of the program. Their willingness to adapt played a major role in its success.
The program grew rapidly. Before long, more than 100 students were enrolled in Viterbo’s degree-completion program, demonstrating that there was substantial unmet demand among working adults for flexible, high-quality educational opportunities.
That experience became my introduction to revenue-share partnerships. Previously, in the early 1990’s I directed an off campus program center using very similar curriculum when I worked for Spring Arbor College, but this took that to an entirely different level.
In 1997, my partner, Glenn Balch, and I co-founded Synergistics, Inc., where we expanded on the same model. Over the next several years, we licensed Roberts Wesleyan’s curriculum to approximately 40 additional colleges and universities while developing new degree-completion programs in Healthcare Management and Criminal Justice.
By the early 2000s, however, another transformation was underway.
The internet was rapidly becoming the mechanism that could solve many of the same access challenges that satellite instructional centers had addressed during the previous decade. Instead of bringing classrooms closer to students geographically, institutions could increasingly bring learning directly into students’ homes.
It became clear that the future of access would be online.
Glenn and I amicably went our separate ways, and I founded Education Strategy, LLC, to focus on what I believed would be the next chapter in higher education partnerships.
That decision ultimately led to collaborations, which when added to the previous ones, totaled approximately 140 colleges and universities, and led us to a period that coincided with the emergence of large-scale online education and a very different generation of revenue share partnerships.
My Insight: Find a motivated, but underserved population, and solve for their need.
I’ll explore that evolution and how the early degree-completion model became the foundation for the modern online partnership ecosystem in my next post.
